The A.V. Club - Men Who Stare At Goats

Film: Review:The Men Who Stare At Goats

Thu, 05 Nov 2009 14:04:00 -0600

A gag early in the eccentric military comedy The Men Who Stare At Goats neatly summarizes what the movie’s about. George Clooney, playing one of a secret cadre of American super-soldiers, is driving into Iraq with hapless reporter Ewan McGregor by his side, and is attempting to demonstrate his ability to disperse clouds with his mind. Clooney successfully clears the sky, but while his eyes are off the road, he crashes into a boulder. The Men Who Stare At Goats effectively satirizes the blinkered arrogance of military types and New Agers, showing Clooney and his colleagues—played by Kevin ...

TV: Parks and Recreation:"Greg Pikitis"

Thu, 29 Oct 2009 23:08:00 -0500

Leslie mentioned at the top of tonight's episode that her boyfriend was a cop. She was talking to Greg Pikitis, a punk teenager who apparently terrorizes the parks department every Halloween, and she showed up at his school to warn him that everything would end this year. So, clearly, she just wanted to shake the kid up, but I got really excited. After many weeks, Louis C.K. was going to be reprising his role as Dave the cop, and that meant Leslie would have a reason to act all kooky again. I've loved the episodes in his ...

Film: Feature:Oscar-O-Meter™: The A.V. Club’s third annual guide to the fall prestige movies, part one

Tue, 29 Sep 2009 00:00:00 -0500

Provided you take our word for it and don’t go back into the archives, the A.V. Club’s Oscar-O-Meter feature has quickly become the definitive tool for Oscar prognostication. Through a rigorously scientific process, our writers have quantified each prestige movie based on a set of criteria: Is it a literary adaptation? Is it topical without being too controversial? Risky without actually being provocative? Does it feature a star who lost weight, gained weight, or made some sort of radical Method transformation? Does it have a middlebrow sense of grandeur? And most importantly, will Academy members feel good ...

TV: Parks and Recreation:"Pawnee Zoo"

Thu, 17 Sep 2009 21:00:00 -0500

Welcome back to Pawnee, government drones. Keith Phipps has left to pursue a career in public service (albeit jail-mandated), so I'll be covering the show from here on out. But first, let's talk about last season. Back when Parks & Recreation premiered, some A.V. Club cronies and I got together to talk about it on our podcast A.V. Talk (short for Audio Visual Talk), where it was lumped with critical and commercial success Sit Down, Shut Up. The theme of the talk, if I remember correctly, was Keith Phipps and Nathan Rabin calmly summing up their feelings ...

Film: Toronto International Film Festival:Toronto Film Festival '09: Day 1

Fri, 11 Sep 2009 07:00:00 -0500

Antichrist Director/Country/Time: Lars Von Trier/Denmark/104 min. Cast: Willem Dafoe, Charlotte Gainsbourg, Fantastic Mr. Fox Program: Masters Headline: A grieving couple takes a literal trip through their personal Hell (and Lars Von Trier's). Noel’s Take: The Dogme rule of taking no credit has long-since been tossed out the window for Lars Von Trier, who opens his new movie with his name scrawled on a huge title card. And appropriately so. Antichrist is a boldly personal film, tossing all Von Trier's oft-repeated ideas about faith and fear and human nature into an unfettered phantasmagoria, full ...

Film: Newswire:Lookie here: The Men Who Stare At Goats trailer

Tue, 01 Sep 2009 17:06:00 -0500

The Dude is a Jedi! Big Lebowski star Jeff Bridges joins Burn After Reading’s George Clooney for a Coen Bros. movie not made by the Coen Bros. The darkly comic Men Who Stare At Goats looks like it borrows heavily from the satirical tone of Burn After Reading. If politically minded black comedy is an emerging sub-genre, can a straight-up Dr. Strangelove remake be far behind? In Goats, Ewan McGregor plays a journalist who enlists the help of Clooney, a so-called “psychic soldier” of the U.S. military who was reactivated following 9/11, and together they set out ...

Film: The New Cult Canon:The Big Lebowski

Thu, 14 May 2009 00:00:00 -0500

“The Dude abides.” —The Stranger, The Big Lebowski With Joel and Ethan Coen’s The Big Lebowski, among the most quotable movie this side of Double Indemnity or Sweet Smell Of Success, perhaps the best place to start is a quote. This one comes from “The Stranger,” Sam Elliott’s sarsaparilla-drinking cowboy narrator, about Jeffrey Lebowski, a.k.a. “The Dude,” the ill-kempt hippie burnout, bowling enthusiast, and accidental detective played by Jeff Bridges: “Sometimes there’s a man… I won’t say a hero, ’cause what’s a hero? Sometimes, there’s a man. And I’m talkin’ about ...

DVD: I Watched This On Purpose:The Island

Wed, 08 Apr 2009 16:49:00 -0500

Sometimes, even The A.V. Club isn’t impervious to the sexy allure of ostensible cultural garbage. Which is why there’s I Watched This On Purpose, our feature exploring the impulse to spend time with trashy-looking yet in some way irresistible entertainments, playing the long odds in hopes of a real reward and a good time. I’ve never enjoyed a Michael Bay movie, but I’ve come to grudgingly respect that he must be on to something. I skipped Bad Boys, but caught The Rock in the theater in 1996, and found nearly every aspect of it hugely ...

TV: True Blood:"The Fourth Man In The Fire"

Sun, 26 Oct 2008 22:57:00 -0500

First, a mea culpa: Last week, there was an explosion of hateration in the comment section over my review of that night’s episode. I sensed it was coming for a while, given my general disappointment with True Blood so far. And it took one sloppily written recap to open up the floodgates. While I don’t apologize for my opinion of the show, there’s certainly no excuse for the myriad mistakes I made in the write-up (on why the vamp nest was torched, on forgetting the “glamouring” power for some reason, et al.) and I vow to keep ...

Film: Inventory:Unbreakable: 18 film stars impervious to box-office flops

Mon, 21 Jan 2008 01:14:00 -0600

1. Bruce Willis All hail the Teflon don of cinematic failure. Over the course of his perhaps regrettably hyper-prolific career, Willis has appeared in some of the biggest, most notorious flops of the past few decades, golden turkeys like Sunset, Hudson Hawk, The Bonfire Of The Vanities, North, Breakfast Of Champions, The Story Of Us, and Perfect Stranger. Yet he remains one of Hollywood's biggest stars and most bankable names. It helps that Willis winks and smirks his way through many of his performances as a way of letting the audience know that he doesn't believe in the ...

Film: Random Roles:Stephen Root

Thu, 20 Dec 2007 03:00:00 -0600

The actor: Stephen Root, the ubiquitous character actor who's made a living stealing scenes as Milton in Office Space, Jimmy James in NewsRadio, Gordon in Dodgeball, the blind radio-station proprietor in O Brother Where Art Thou?, and others, not to mention his role as the voice of Bill Dauterive on King Of The Hill. Being omnipresent, he has a slew of projects out or in the works, from No Country For Old Men to Leatherheads, George Clooney's upcoming comedy about the early days of football. Office Space (1999)—"Milton Waddams" Stephen Root: Mike [Judge, director] was originally going ...

Film: Review:Michael Clayton

Thu, 04 Oct 2007 15:32:00 -0500

Though he won a permanent spot in the hearts of 10-year-old girls everywhere by penning the early '90s tween romance favorite The Cutting Edge, screenwriter Tony Gilroy is best known as the scribe behind Matt Damon's Bourne franchise. With his directorial debut Michael Clayton Gilroy shifts his focus from international espionage to corporate duplicity and sinister legal machinations, but retains an emotional palette rich in grays and black. Like Damon in the Bourne movies, the film's protagonist, a high-powered legal clean-up man suffering from professional exhaustion and ennui, cuts himself off from his emotions and transforms himself into ...

Film: My Year Of Flops:Case File #28: A Life Less Ordinary

Tue, 01 May 2007 18:40:00 -0500

1997's A Life Less Ordinary is the perfect example of a movie that lived and died by hype. In theory at least the film was supposed to be Pulp Fiction to Trainspotting's Resevoir Dogs: a seismic pop culture event that would catapult a cult filmmaker squarely and permanently into the mainstream. Like Resevoir Dogs, Trainspotting won over critics, hipsters and the intelligentsia and made its creators' cult heroes/minor cultural deities without wracking up particularly strong number at the box-office A Life Less Ordinary was supposed to herald yet another glorious British invasion. It was designed to be ...

Film: Review:Good Night, And Good Luck

Wed, 05 Oct 2005 13:52:00 -0500

As a filmmaker, George Clooney is still too much of a fan. His overdirected 2002 debut Confessions Of A Dangerous Mind was so choked with stylistic razzle-dazzle and homages to Clooney's favorite films of the '60s and '70s that it could barely breathe. His otherwise breezy and engaging new movie Good Night, And Good Luck is the work of a man clearly in love with the dashing, outsized romance of crusading journalism exemplified by Edward R. Murrow—the drama of live television, politics, history, and the way cigarette smoke curls ever so elegantly in creamy black and white. Murrow ...

Men Who Stare At Goats: Interview:Chuck Barris

Wed, 28 May 2003 15:00:00 -0500

As far as Chuck Barris' detractors were concerned, his bawdy, lowbrow game shows exploited and demeaned their contestants, cheapened the level of discourse on television, and appealed to the basest instincts of the lowest common denominator. But to his fans, Barris was an affable scoundrel who provided ordinary folks with a shot at fame (however fleeting) and entertained the masses with unpretentious populist fare. A self-deprecating renaissance man, Barris made an indelible mark on pop culture as a game-show creator, beginning with 1965's The Dating Game. The program was an enormous hit and inspired 1966's The Newlywed Game ...